“@penllawen”?
My username on Twitter,Tumblr and a few other places, PenLlawen, has a funny story behind it. As you probably all know my real name is Richard Gaywood 1. I started off on Twitter as @richardgaywood, and kept that for eighteen months.
However when I started using Twitter a bit more it seemed rather long and cumbersome in @-replies, so I wanted something shorter. I emailed a Welsh-speaking friend of mine 2 and asked him to translate “gaywood” into Welsh for me, because I’m a huge nerd and like cross-lingual puns. He suggested a few alternative translations, and I settled on pen (piece of wood, rather than a forest) llawen (merry) — in Welsh the adjective goes after the noun.
Except he mistyped. A piece of wood is pren. Pen means “head”. So, my name means “merryhead”. I liked the story though, so I kept it.
Notes